Description: Biblical criticism faces increasing hostility on two fronts: from biblical conservatives, who claim it is inherently positivistic and religiously skeptical, and from postmodernists, who see it as driven by the falsities of objectivity and neutrality. In this magisterial overview of the key factors and developments in biblical studies, John Barton demonstrates that these evaluations of biblical criticism fail to do justice to the work that has been done by critical scholars over many generations. Traditional biblical criticism has had as its central concern a semantic interest: a desire to establish the "plain sense" of the biblical text, which in itself requires sensitivity to many literary aspects of texts. Therefore, he argues, biblical criticism already includes many of the methodological approaches now being recommended as alternatives to it—and, further, the agenda of biblical studies is far less fragmented than often thought. Subjects: Bible, Literature
Review by James D. G. Dunn
Read the Review
Published 4/12/2008
Citation: James D. G. Dunn, review of John Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, Review of Biblical Literature [http://www.bookreviews.org] (2008).
Adobe Acrobat Reader
 All RBL reviews are published in PDF format. To view these reviews, you must have downloaded and installed the FREE version of Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you do not have the Reader or you have an older version of the Reader, you can download the most recent version now. |
